Night falls, and Chihiro is clearly in trouble as ghosts arrive and congregate about her. Because it is a movie, a manchild named Haku (v.b. Jason Marsden) shows up and guides her to relative safety, as a bather in the bath house of wicked witch Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette). There, she is one of many employees who service the stream of spirit patrons who arrive in need of a good soaking.
All the while, Chihiro plots her escape, but only if she can leave with her parents, who at the moment remain pigs presumably destined for fattening and slaughter.
Other characters include a giant talking baby, Chihiro's would-be older sister Lin, Yubaba's less evil identical sister Zeniba, and multi-armed boiler room foreman Kamaji.
How others will see it. There is no doubt that, among all of Hayao Miyazaki's features, Spirited Away is the most well received. At imdb.com, it has the highest user votes (687K), and the highest user rating (8.6 out of 10). It won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the only such win for his studio. At BAFTA, it was nominated for Best Film, a remarkable achievement for an all-animated movie. The worldwide box office was exceeded $350M, more than double the $170M gross for Princess Monokone (1997), which had no Oscar nominations, only about half the user votes, and a slightly lower user rating (8.4).
But why is Spirited Away considered better than Princess Monokone? The explanation is less than obvious. After all, Princess Monokone is a great film. So, we turn to the imdb.com user reviews. The positive adjectives there include "beautiful", "amazing", "stunning", "magical", "fantastic", etc.
It must be noted that Spirited Away is at least two different movies. There's the Studio Gibli version, with Japanese voice actors, and the Disney version, which retains the animation but uses American voice actors. Some call the Disney version dubbed, but of course all animated films are dubbed.
The question is whether Disney uses inferior voice actors, or, more likely, dumb downs the dialogue such that much is lost in translation. Certainly I don't know. I would have to master the Japanese language first, or else rely upon the accuracy of the English captions, which on the Disney DVDs are presumably identical to those on the Disney-dubbed version.
How I felt about it. No doubt, multiple viewings would help explain the plot. As it is, the three bouncing green heads are just weird, as is the evil witch's obsession with the oversized talking baby. I don't understand what No-Face is about, why it eats people, or why it has such an interest in our heroine.
Haku's interest in Chihiro/Sen is also unexplained. How can a river spirit transform into a dragon or a manchild? Why does the witch turn into a vulture at night? For exercise? If the evil witch's identical twin is good, then why would she put a curse on her magical golden seal to kill anyone who takes it? How do spirits become covered with mud, and in need of a bath house?
Chihiro is another entry in "The Hero of a Thousand Faces" as described in 1949 by Joseph Campbell. Her courage is motivated by love, for her parents and Haku. Nonetheless, she is a bland hero, wide eyed and blundering at first, but all too soon she is a master of her strange new environment. It would have been more credible had she remained as scared and clueless as she was at first.
In fact, it might have worked out better if Spirited Away was made as a comedy. There is humor here, but it is subtle, and not really the point, which is fantasy adventure. We'll have to wait for the "South Park" crew to lampoon the genre.